Episode Details

The Stamp Act of 1765 was a small tax. To the men who wrote it in London, it was the most reasonable thing in the world: the colonies should help pay for their own defense. So why did a few pennies on paper nearly tear the British Empire apart?

This is the episode where the argument begins, not in the streets but on the page, in a war of pamphlets between the finest legal minds on both sides of the Atlantic. James Otis declares that taxation without representation is tyranny. Daniel Dulany takes the British theory of “virtual representation” and tears it to shreds. And in London, the witty Soame Jenyns calls the whole colonial case an absurdity, while the great jurist Blackstone insists that Parliament’s power is simply absolute.

Both sides were standing on solid English ground. That was the problem. This is the story of two constitutions that could not both be true, the rights of Englishmen colliding with the sovereignty of Parliament, and a quarrel that no repeal could ever really fix.